We expand our services to three new women's centres
We’re so pleased to have started working in three new centres for women and girls – each of them in non-camp locations.
The centres are in Seje, Sharya and Khanke, which are districts near Duhok city where many displaced people live alongside host communities.
Designed to serve as safe spaces for women and girls, the centres will see us provide a range of much-needed activities, with support from our partners CARE Iraq and European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations.
These activities include mental health therapy in individual and group sessions, as well as case management to help beneficiaries reach the protection-related services they need.
We’ll also provide coordinated referrals so that beneficiaries can be connected with other service providers in different locations. The centres will host awareness-raising sessions too, including advocacy on protection subjects and women's rights.
While we will of course continue working in our camp-based centres, we believe it’s so important to expand our reach to out-of-camp locations. According to a needs overview by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, it’s where some of the most vulnerable people live, and extremely limited services mean they are often ‘left behind.’ With very few protection services for women existing in these out-of-camp locations, transportation issues also limit their access to what may be available elsewhere. Added to that is an entrenched stigma around women seeking support for mental health issues and other protection needs.
According to UNHCR Iraq, about 39% of the 93,000 Syrian refugees and 68% of the 625,000 IDPs hosted in the Duhok Governorate are living out of camps, the majority in urban areas, mixing with host communities. Many of these families and individuals live in informal sites, which include unfinished buildings and rented houses.
The same protection project has seen us providing cash assistance to those with little or no income in order to access essential support services, as well as legal help. And we’ve also been providing resilience sessions for children and young people, and distributing dignity kits containing sanitary items to vulnerable women and girls.
With these new centres expanding the Lotus Flower’s reach further, we’re so glad it means we can now target women and girls who have previously had no support at all…
